birth trauma in babies

Birth is "the profound but necessary shock of being expelled from the uterus"
Gabor Mate, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts

I remember hearing about birth trauma when my daughter was only a few months old and wondering whether it was possible for babies to suffer from trauma.

So I wanted to write about how I came to understand that while not all births are traumatic, birth can cause trauma. To understand birth trauma, we must first understand that babies have feelings - real feelings. This may seem obvious to some but for most parents it's surprising to think that babies have feelings, and that feelings do not depend on language. If they did, then we would have to conclude that children could only feel things when they were able to start talking, which for some might be 18 months and for other not until they're closer to 3 years old. I think it's easy to see that a 2 year old has feelings, regardless of whether they can talk or not. So yes, babies have real feelings too, they are born feeling things and they can even feel things in utero.

If they have feelings then being born can often be traumatic. The French obstetrician Michel Odent described how the medical birth experience and the noise, bright lights and harsh unknown voices were overwhelming for a newborn infant. According to Dr. Gabor Maté, trauma is “any experience that’s too much for us to process, digest, and integrate.” We can see how some birth experiences are traumatic - from medical interventions to prolonged labour, to separation from the mother after birth. If an experience was traumatic for the mother, then it would likely be traumatic for the newborn infant (who felt the mother's stress, powerlessness or worry, but without the capacity to understand what was happening). And even when birth was peaceful, not too long and without intervention, it can also be traumatic for more sensitive babies, because trauma is not what happens to us, but how we deal with it.

And I love that babies can heal from trauma with our loving support. Babies and children can recover from trauma immediately after, or at any time later on, because they are born knowing innately how to recover from trauma. They have the ability to spontaneously use these healing mechanisms - as long as they feel safe in the presence of a loving caregiver.

My intention is always to give parents reassurance rather than instill worry and I'm not willing for anyone to be judged. So if you're worrying about whether your baby may have experienced birth trauma, I invite you to reach out to me. In a free 15-min Discovery call you can ask any questions you may have about this.

I also highly recommend the following podcasts:

The Aware Parenting Podcast
Episode 113 - Babies and birth trauma
Episode 2 - The Power of Birth

Aware Parenting Stories with Joss
Episode 17 - Healing your Traumatized Child with Aletha Solter